Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Project Runway

Looking for an inexpensive way to encourage and excite your child's fascination with flight? Here's a very easy and fun project to do with them. We live within a mile from the closest airport, so with both of our kids it sparked their curiosity very early with all of the noise. We did this project with them back in February and it is still one of their favorite things to play with... in fact, they were just landing planes on it this morning!

Here's a secret:

Home Depot (I'm sure Lowe's does too) has a scrap-wood bin. We check the bin every time we go and stock up on pieces of wood and MDF board at a fraction of the price! We have created a pile of scrap wood that we store in the garage for all future projects.

Using masking tape, we masked off where the grass line would be as well as the solid and divided yellow lines.

We then painted the yellow lines with our paintbrush.

Once the yellow was dry, we covered the runway with newspaper and taped.

We then spray painted the exposed sides green.

Optional:

We later added a helicopter pad to our runway. We picked up an unfinished 4" x 4" round wooden plaque from Michaels and painted it white. Using masking tape, we made the letter H in the middle. We then spray painted the exposed wood black. We added a yellow border using the yellow project paint and secured it to our runway grass with wood glue.